Talk:Link Joker/@comment-20669973-20140423170726/@comment-24699797-20140425171603
I'm not really here to discuss game design, but I suppose a little can't hurt. Your counterpoint to my post was that a high cost for a good skill is justifiable; this wording I cannot disagree with. However, what I actually said was that a high cost doesn't justify an overly strong skill. You might look at those effect individually and think the skill isn't overly powerful, but the game isn't played inside the bubble of any single card's text. That would be like arguing that Mr. Invincible is overpowered because you're outright ignoring the other costs you could be paying instead of a Mega Blast, and that your opponent is capable of guarding so it just never hits. Your forgetting the implications of the card elsewhere in the game, which leads into the main point I was trying to make: the particular effect you proposed is bad design. This isn't a slight towards you, it's just that the card doesn't have a single unified purpose, which contradicts Vanguard's card design, and that it doesn't have any counterplay whatsoever, the latter of which I was most critical about in my previous post. Put simply, your card says: "If you don't guard this attack, I will hit, with my Twin Drive yet to be accounted for; this could take you out of the game at four to five damage, and if you're at five damage, you either guard, or hope of a Heal Trigger. If you do successfully guard this attack, I can attack again, this time having had a second Twin Drive yet to be accounted for, and the likelyhood of having hit at least one Trigger in four checks is extremely high, so I'm likely to take you out from four damage. Even if you guard this, you now have at least two columns significantly weakened and have lost a large amount of cards guarding, meaning the cost I paid the previous turn puts me at no more of a defensive disadvantage than I would have been at otherwise, meaning there was little to no risk taken to execute the restand skill. On the other hand, you were forced to choose between hoping for a Heal Trigger, or putting yourself in this situation where you can't possibly launch an attack that will hit and where you need to finish the game this turn, otherwise you lose anyway." That is not good game design. Most restand skills force an opponent sitting at five damage to either hope for a Heal Trigger on the first hit, or force them to guard both hits if they're ahead enough to do so. If they are ahead, they're rewarded with the ability to survive with much greater certainty and to launch an attack on the next turn. In contrast, with yours they can of course still gamble on a Heal Trigger. However, even if they're ahead and capable of guarding with certainty, they're punished for making use of the lead they've built by having their ability to counterattack taken from them. Losing that turn late game after guarding against what is a huge late game threat is a losing situation, even if they were ahead, and while this is what Link Joker tries to do, this card can do it on its own, in a single turn, without presenting your opponent any correct way of playing against it. This is not something which can reasonably be balanced for without making the cost or conditions too difficult to be consistently practical, and as such the card would simply fall into disuse. Cards are allowed to be strong, they're just not allowed to pop out of nowhere to singlehandedly turn a losing game around with little to no cost or risk, without presenting a correct method of playing against it. I can see the argument coming that Glendios does this, but that's an incorrect statement, since Glendios needs the entire deck built around it to the point where you can see it coming a mile off.